Jill Lepore offers a workshop for a limited number of M.A. and doctoral students in the humanities on the day follwing the Hegel Lecture. Prerequisite for participatiation in the workshop is attendance of the Hegel Lecture “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” on February 12th. 

Jill Lepore writes in a November 4, 2024 New Yorker article on "The Artificial State," "Building an artificial state took decades, and it happened mainly by accident." Yet the loneliness, anger, and environmental degradation that have ensued continue to reverberate as humans outsource governance of their lives to AI. "In lieu of decision-making by democratic deliberation, the artificial state offers prediction by calculation, the capture of the public sphere by data-driven commerce, and the replacement of humans with machines—drones in the place of the demos," Lepore continues. What do humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy and the liberal nation-state for rule by automation and government by machines? If the artificial state is a product of accident and opportunism, how might it best be dismantled?

Moderator: Helen Gibson (John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin)

Students who are interested in participating in the workshop are requested to write to admin@dhc.fu-berlin.de by February 1, stating student status (MA/PhD student), university, degree program, dissertation topic (if applicable) as well as motivation for wanting to participate. Attendance of the workshop is only possible after confirmation by the Dahlem Humanities Center.